This Week's Issue: 'New Moon''s record-breaking opening and where Hollywood goes from here

Call it battle of the abs. Or the teen screams heard round the world. Either way, Summit Entertainment’s The Twilight Saga: New Moon did more business on its opening weekend than any other movie this year. Now that it’s the biggest fall opening ever at $142.8 million and its opening day number of $72.7 million outgrossed The Dark Knight’s first-day figure, Hollywood should finally accept that women drive the box office in a big way. “It’s great that the greenlighters in town have realized that little girls go to the movies,” says MGM’s president of marketing Michael Vollman. “But this genre has worked forever. To Sir With Love was an angsty girl movie.”

So what will this fickle, yet incredibly devoted audience turn to next? Disney thinks it could be…fairies. The studio has scooped up Aprilynne Pike’s best-selling young adult novel Wings and cast Miley Cyrus in an adaptation. New Regency is banking on a new novel from Ann Brashares (author of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) called My Name is Memory, while Lionsgate hopes tweens line up for an adaptation of author Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. “Some will work and some won’t,” Summit’s co-chairman and CEO Rob Friedman says of the girl-driven projects. No matter what, “It won’t be The Twilight Saga. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

For more on New Moon and its impact on Hollywood, pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, on stands November 27.